[cpunks]

I have an extremely, extremely, extremely healthy level of skepticism. We do substantial business with AWS. When they went down and came back up, some of our data was damaged. I called my Amazon rep, who put me in contact with Amazon engineers, who helped us recover. Amazon can do that -- they're a service organization, and they're used to working with customers and making them happy.

Google's customer service, in contrast, has a raison d'etre of avoiding customers. As a customer, the feeling you get is mild disdain. This is necessary -- one support call for Google.com can wipe out the profits from thousands of people. This translate into how they handle the enterprise market. I use Google Apps for my organization. I needed to enable Google+ for a social presence. This required applying into a black hole which, for a long time, did nothing. Support e-mails went to someone who clearly was in the business of neither having nor giving out information.

Here's an experiment for you: Pretend you want to try Google App Engine, but your cell is not on one of the providers Google supports (I've been there). You just a credit card, and a willingness to spend a bit of cash. Try to buy some service. See how far you get.

I use Google internal to my organization for things like Google Apps; if it has issues, employees will deal, and it saves a big chunk of work and cash. For anything customer-facing, I really do want a partner whom I can talk to if there are issues, not a black box designed to reject support requests.